Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 04/20 – The Apple “Spring Loaded” Media Event

Episode Date: April 20, 2021

All of the headlines from Apple’s “Spring Loaded” event. All of the announcements Mark Zuckerberg made in that Discord room yesterday. Binance hires a former regulator to be its new CEO. And Fitbit wants to sell you a fashion forward Fitness Tracker. Sponsors: ManlyBands.com/techmeme Kracken.com/techmeme Classified: RobBettis.com Links: Apple updates 11" and 12.9" iPad Pros with M1, 8-core GPU, Thunderbolt, up to 2TB storage, 5G, 1080p FaceTime HD camera, and a miniLED screen on the 12.9" model (Techmeme) Apple introduces Podcasts Subscriptions to pay creators for content in redesigned app (9to5Mac) Facebook unveils suite of new audio products (Axios) Clubhouse’s Monthly Downloads Plunged 72% Last Month (The Wrap) Cryptocurrency Giant Binance.US Hires Former Top Bank Regulator (WSJ) Fitbit’s Luxe is a fashion-focused fitness band that costs $149.95 (The Verge) (Order your own classified at: https://www.ridehome.info/p/classifieds/) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Tuesday, April 20th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. All the headlines from Apple's spring-loaded event. All of the announcements Mark Zuckerberg made in that Discord room yesterday. Binance hires a former regulator to be its new CEO. And Fitbit wants to sell you a fashion-forward fitness tracker. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. All right, let's do this. Tim Cook kicked things off this afternoon talking about the Apple credit card of all things. Apparently spouses and partners can now merge their credit lines, and there's a new Apple card family program where you can give anyone over the age of 13 access to card spending power

with spending limits built in. There is now a completely redesigned Apple podcast app with new channels, new artwork, and a new Apple podcast subscription service. I'm sure we'll talk about this on the Twitter space later tonight, but a quick TLDR, Apple will now let podcasters spin up their own subscription products, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. The Apple podcasters program, which includes all of the tools needed to offer premium subscriptions on Apple Podcasts, is available to creators in over 170 countries and regions for $19.99 per year. Creators can enroll in the Apple Podcast program today through Apple Podcasts Connect, end quote. But guess what? On top of that per year feed, I just now saw Casey Newton

tweet that Apple will still take their traditional 30% cut. Yeah, we'll feel. We'll for sure talk about that in the Twitter space tonight, but that's inside baseball stuff for me, right? You came here for the products. So, real quick, there is now a new purple version of the iPhone that looks pretty delicious. You can pre-order it this Friday, and it's available April 30th. And yes, air tags, they're finally here. Air tags look pretty much how you'd expect them to look. Little pog-like discs, you can personalize them. And the idea is you attach them to your things so you don't lose said things. But notice I said attach, not stick to.

So apparently there is a flood of accessories coming towards us to attach these things to everything you might want to attach them to. They work using ultra-wideband, as you'd expect, so any iPhone with a U1 chip can send you through your house, Marco Polo style, to find whatever it is you've lost. The air tags apparently have a one-year battery life,

and I'm pretty sure I saw that this is a user-volar. replaceable battery, so that's nice. It's $29 for one, $99 for a pack of four. They're available April 30th with the pre-order starting today. The Apple TV 4K got an upgrade with the addition of the A12 bionic chip, which now allows Apple TV 4K to support high frame rate HDR. Airplay now supports high frame rate HDR. There's a fancy new feature that lets you use your phone, holding its sensors up to the screen, to do color balancing. But weirdly, I think the biggest news is they redesigned the stupid Apple TV remote. It's still aluminum, but now it's got real buttons and a circular touch disk with jog control, so almost exactly like an old school iPod. Also, this remote can finally power on

and power off your TV as well as mute it. The Siri button has been moved to the side. What I'm curious about is this would have been the perfect time to also mention that the remote would work with FindMy as well. And they did not mention that, which is a shame because the Apple TV remote is the one thing in my life that I misplace the most. Anywho, $179 for the 32-gigabyte version, $199 for the 64-gigabyte version, and onto, in my opinion, the biggest news of the day. We also got new IMAX. Yes, the IMAX got the M1 chip. Yes, the IMAX got a major redesign. And basically, I would say the redesign is this. Imagine a super duper sized iPad Pro attached to a swivel arm. That's what this looks like, and it's sexy as hell. Basically,

the entire computing part of it is as thin and sexy and light looking as you could possibly imagine while still having a big IMAX screen. There are seven different colors, also looking delicious as hell. Let me state again, these things are thin as hell, 11.5 millimeters thin, in fact. How'd they get so thin? Apple says it's thanks to the M1 chip, of course, which allowed them to create smaller logic boards and smaller thermal systems. The display is 24 inches, but the overall body of the machine is only slightly bigger than the old 21.5 inch iMacs. The screen is what Apple is calling 4.5K, with 500 nits of brightness and true tone. There's a new six speaker system and get this a 1080p webcam with a

three mic array with beam forming and noise reduction the better to zoom you with my dear. Apple says it's the best webcam they've ever put into a Mac which of course it is. Apple has put terrible terrible cameras in Macs for far too long. With the chip upgrade, Apple says the CPU in these IMAX is 85% faster. It's a 2x. improvement on the GPU compared to some other actually not specified previous iMacs. In the back you get up to for USBC ports. Notice I said up to more on that in a second. There is no SD card slot, sadly. There is a woven power cord that should hopefully be more durable than the power cords of recent vintage. The power connects to the back of the machine

via a magnet, and one of the models, the power brick, has the Ethernet port built into the brick itself. And now there are new color-matched keyboards, Magic Mice, Trackpads. Basically, you can match the color of the aluminum to the color of the aluminum on your machine. And get this, the keyboards have gotten Touch ID. As for pricing, there's a $1,299 base model that gets four colors, the 1,400, $199 base model comes in seven colors. Further differences between the two. The 1299 gets you an eight-core CPU, a seven-core GPU, eight gigabytes of unified memory, 256-gigabyte SSD,

two Thunderbolt ports, again, two. That's because the 1499 model gets an eight-core CPU, an eight-core GPU, so one more core on the GPU, then the same eight-gabytes of memory, the same 256 base SSD. but this model gets two thunderbolts and two USB 3 ports. Plus the magic keyboard with touch ID and Ethernet in the brick only comes with the more expensive model. So I guess this means that the lower end model is Wi-Fi only. All of this for pre-order April 20th, available the second half of May.

And then finally today came the iPad pros. The iPad pros are getting the M1. ships as well. Not M1 like chips, as was rumored, the actual M1 chips. So the exact same chips as are available on all of these new Mac models from the last year or so. I was watching the live stream from The Verge and Nelai pointed out, what's the best way to get developers to make single apps that run on the Mac and the iPad Pro? Give them all the same architecture. Deeter said the iPad Pro should do Mac stuff discussion is about to get lit. With the M1s. Apple says 50% performance jump over previous gen, 40% graphics jump. The outer design has not changed

at all, but you can now get as much as a 2 terabyte configuration. Also, for the first time that I can ever remember with an iPad, Apple mentioned you could spec it up to 16 gigabytes of memory. Also, the pro now has Thunderbolt and USB4 support, also 5G, and the cameras. There is now an ultra-wide camera and a new feature called Center Stage that auto pans to follow you as you move around, just like I've been saying the Facebook portal does. And yes, at least the highest end model gets micro-LED, which Apple is calling mini-LED for reasons that I don't know, but actually their name for this is the Liquid Retina XDR display. It's got a thousand nits, 1600-nit peak brightness, but there are 10,000 LEDs in this thing. And it's only

available on the 12.9 inch model. So to sum up, there's an 11-inch model starting at $799, and a 12.9-inch model starting at $1,099, which is $100 more than before. But as I said, that one is the only one with the micro LED, so that's what you're paying extra for. To sum up the iPad Pro news generally, no major functional changes to the iPad Pros beyond the front camera being able to follow you around, and the XDR display on the 12.9 inch model. Otherwise, it's just faster chips and the exact same hardware design. Let's end with what we didn't see today. No iPad mini update, no AirPods, and no word on the 27-inch IMAX, which I just checked are still being sold. So one wonders, when might the next generation of chip beyond the M1 get announced?

Might that be reserved for MacBook Pros and the 27-inch IMac? Maybe at WWDC, would that be too soon, but certainly some time this year, right? There was some other news today, but first, let me catch you up on what Mark Zuckerberg announced yesterday in that Discord room with Casey Newton. Zuckerberg said Facebook is planning a short-form audio product called Soundbites, a podcast discovery tool, and more audio products over the next three to six months. Zuckerberg also said that Facebook is working with Spotify on a music integration project, codenamed Project Boombox. Facebook then officially announced that it will start testing live audio rooms in groups

and expects to roll out the feature to everyone on the Facebook app by the summer. Nice little sum up here from Sarah Fisher and Axios, quote, sound bites. Facebook's new short-form audio product will serve users' streams of brief clips. Zuckerberg says this product is like an audio version of its TikTok-like video product reels. Users can share individual clips to their news feeds or they can consume a string of audio clips joined together and algorithmically distributed in a feed. Podcasts. Zuckerberg says Facebook is going to build a podcast discovery tool for creators to share their

podcasts with users on Facebook and also for users to consume and discover podcasts on Facebook. He alluded to Facebook potentially partnering with an external podcast app and guiding users to that app to listen to podcasts in the background of their Facebook experience. Live audio, quote, every once in a while, a new medium comes along that can be adopted into a lot of different areas, Zuck said, using the news feed as a previous example. Zuckerberg suggested there will be ways live audio can help Facebook boost the creator economy. Zuckerberg said Facebook's goal is to build a suite of audio products that will ultimately be as strong as its text, photo, and video products. Quote, at a high-level picture here, we think audio is going to be a first-class medium

he said, end quote. Because we've had so much recent discussion of Clubhouse, I wanted to share this tidbit real quick, because it's something that I've been hearing people whisper about for a couple weeks now, but these are the first numbers I've actually seen published. According to Censor Tower, Clubhouse was downloaded 2.7 million times in March, which represents a 72% decline from February's download numbers of more than 9.5 million. Now, I don't have to be a lot. Now, I don't have have an opinion on this either way, but here's a quick bullcase, bearcase debate from Twitter. First here's Austin Allred. Hype cycles aren't what makes great companies.

Copycats almost never kill great companies. Clubhouse created a unique mechanism of social interaction and has the cash, team, and wherewithal to see it through. It might take 10 years, but I bet it 10 X's from here easy, end quote. And Dare Abisancho, also on Twitter, quote, it'll be ironic if every social app rushes to copy Clubhouse, and it ends up like every app copying folksonomies, tag clouds from Flickr, and users concluding it was a fun gimmick, but not actually useful, end quote.

Interesting news from the crypto world. Crypto Exchange Binance is getting a new CEO on May 1st. He's Brian Brooks, who just so happened to be acting head of the office of the comptroller of the currency under the Trump administration. Quoting the Wall Street Journal. During his time at the OCC, Mr. Brooks was dubbed the Crypto-comptroller on social media for his friendly attitude toward digital currencies. Under his watch, the OCC released guidance clarifying that banks could provide cryptocurrency

custody services and use stablecoins to facilitate payment activities, moves that helped make it easier for traditional financial institutions to get into crypto. Stable coins are a type of digital coin. backed by a commodity or traditional currency like the U.S. dollar. Mr. Brooks was acting head of the OCC, a unit of the Treasury Department from May 2020 to January. Before joining the OCC, he was the chief legal officer of Coinbase, the U.S. Bitcoin Exchange. He also previously worked as General Counsel of Mortgage Giant Fannie Mae. Crypto companies have hired a number of former officials in recent months as they increasingly seek mainstream acceptance. Such hires could help companies such as Binance and

Coinbase navigate potential pitfalls in the emerging U.S. regulatory framework for digital currencies, but they are also a striking contrast to the early libertarian vision of Bitcoin as a way to conduct transactions outside the reach of governments. Last month, Coinbase said it was hiring the Securities and Exchange Commission's former top regulator for stock exchanges, Brett Redfern, as a vice president, end quote. Also in crypto news, Venmo has added support for buying, holding, and selling four types of cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Lightcoin, and Bitcoin Cash, quoting TechCrunch. The company had already announced its plans to introduce cryptocurrency on Venmo in 2021. Both Venmo and PayPal support for crypto comes by way of a partnership with Paxos Trust Company,

a regulated provider of cryptocurrency products and services. Though there isn't much differentiation between what both PayPal and Venmo offer users today, the company explains that the move is more about getting cryptocurrencies in front of a separate and arguably younger audience, end quote. Finally, today we led the show today with big product announces, so here's one more. Fitbit has unveiled Lux, a $150 fashion-focused fitness tracker coming this spring with a wide range of bands, up to five days of battery life, and an OLED touchscreen, quoting the verge. The Lux was designed for a, quote, diverse range of wrist sizes and skin tones for 24-7 wear. Fitbit says the Lux is its thinnest touchscreen tracker yet, and the company thinks most people should be able to sleep comfortably with it on.

To that end, you won't need to charge it every night, as Fitbit claims it'll last up to five days per charge. The Lux is angled toward people who want their fitness tracker to be taken for jewelry. The company even went so far as using a metal injection molding process to craft the Lux's stainless steel case, which is apparently a traditional technique for jewelry making. The Lux is a buttonless tracker and inputs are delegated to its color OLED touchscreen. Like its previous smartwatches and trackers, FitBits Lux will be supported for iOS and Android devices. It will also support Google FastPair to pair more quickly to Android devices. The Lux supports connected GPS while pairing to your phone, so you'll need to bring your phone along if you want to track runs or walks.

If having built-in GPS is important to you, Fitbits charge four include that and other features like Fitbit pay and spot. Spotify controls, end quote. A couple quick programming notes here. Chris and I will be doing a Twitter space tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific. We're going to be talking about the Apple event. Everyone's got an opinion on that, right? So join us on Twitter at that time. Raise your hand and please join in the conversation.

Again, on Twitter 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific. Also, yesterday I joked that I saw so many U.S. media types on Twitter who were, like, Can someone please explain this whole European soccer super league controversy to me? And I suggested that they all come into a clubhouse room and I do the explaining for them, which no one took me up on. But then, Jack saw me say that, so we did one better. If you, too, are confused about what the Super League brouhaha is all about and want me to do the explaining for you, listen to yesterday's episode of the Cockkey Ride Home.

Search your podcast app for Ride Home and you should find it. Finally, we haven't had one of these in a while, but one of your fellow listeners purchased a classified ad, which you're about to hear. Remember, these classified ads are available to you as well to promote projects, offer jobs, seek jobs, and work and stuff. Basically, exactly what it says it is, a classified ad to reach other listeners in the community of listeners of this podcast. If you'd like to run a classified of your own, go to ridehome.com. forward slash P, forward slash classifieds link in the show notes. Listen up. Are you an online retailer? Are you growing in the current e-commerce boom or have your attempts at scaling fallen flat? Rob Bettis is an independent digital marketer who helps boutique e-commerce brands build bigger, better businesses online with paid media.

Unlike agencies who are all about scale, Rob works with a limited number of businesses managing advertising on Google, Facebook, Instagram, Instagram, ensuring every client gets the attention and expertise they deserve. Since starting his solo practice, Rob has managed $2.5 million in paid media and generated an average return on ad spend of over 600% for his clients. And he wants to do the same for you. If you want to build a bigger, better e-commerce brand, contact Rob at Robbettis.com or click the link in the show notes. That's Rob Bettis, B-E-T-I-S dot com.

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